Sure the bandwidth/storage costs matters, but they are a fraction of the cost of a physical good.

On popular marketplaces and streaming services (Google Play, Spotify, Netflix...), you are paying either on a per-file (e.g. you download an app) or on a per-access basis (you pay X€ a month to access a library).

Paying per-file is usually easier to reason about: you pay 10€, the marketplace keeps X% and gives the rest back to the file creator.

I can't emphasize enough how much both models sucks, both for content creators and comsumers.

In both, the service holds a huge amount of power:

- It can remove a content at any time, for any reason.- Because it receives the money in the first place, it can also increase its cut whenever it wants.- Because of the centralization of content and consumers on a handful of services, creators have usually no leverage to negociate better conditions.

Regardless of the good or bad behaviour of the actors operating those models, I believe paying to access content is an issue in itself, as it means people without money or a credit card cannot access the content.

And because the act of paying is enforced by the distributors, all the content is hosted on the internet, in silos, and it is not replicated elsewhere.

The way I see it, most if not all of Those issues comes from fear: creators that publish their content on those services are afraid people will consume their content without giving back anything to them.

And this is quite understandable. When you work hard on something, you want to know it will give you financial security in the future, so you can focus on other projects.

- How much the creator will get from my purchase? 10%? 20%? What a shame.- The creator already gets a lot of money, I'd rather give that money to someone with less resources.- I want to support the creator, but I don't really care about the CD/File/Game/Whatever

1. We have a network of content servers (Peertube, Funkwhale, MediaGoblin instances...). Those servers are hosting and replicating the content (music, videos, whatever), making it available on the internet, *for free* (this is important)2. Creators publish their content on those servers3. Creators define needs/goals in a standardized way. Those are also made available publicly

(3. Could be based on ActivityPub, but let's focus on the bigger picture here)

Sample needs could be:

- Receiving 500€ a week for my work on X- Get help to organize a concert in town Y- Get user feedback about my new project Z so I can fix the last issues- Receive 1500€ to finance my next video project

As a creator, you could share various channels to get your financial contributions: a Liberapay account, a Ğ1 or Bitcoin address, an IBAN, a PayPal account, a Patreon or Tipeee page, a Flattr address...

Finally, and it's probably the most important thing to me, money is not required to access culture anymore (which is quite antisocial, when you think about it).

All the burden of managing DRM systems, access control, complex royalties scheme, all the piracy guilt and shame, all of the projects that died by lack of audience and could have work, all of this become irrelevant.

I'm following the development of Funkwhale as a publisher and writer, and I could see a similar system to stream/distribute audiobooks and ebooks to be pretty easy to develop. Alas, I'm in no way a developer myself, so I hope someone else could find it important to develop it.

In that context, the question of how to collect payments is very important, and the model you just outlined sounds...

@eliotberriot ... very interesting. I could see a case where we as a cooperative publisher run our own federated server to distribute our own books — and collect payments to our writers and other creative workers.

Thus at least I'm willing to explore this idea both as a writer and publisher, and as a reader (”consumer”).

Also, the licencing for translations, filmations etc. is important, but this in no way limits it, as something like CC-BY-ND-NC...

@eliotberriot some great stuff in your thread. A lot to unpack. Here a couple critiques though.

1: It doesn’t have to be just high non transparent subscription or pay per view/download. You could mix a low monthly subscription with micro charges to cover overhead and provide access to a large amount of “quality” content while incentivizing breakout content.

The whole point of this thread is to explore something that is not payment-wall or subscription based (at least not subscription *required*).

While reducing the prices and tweaking the parameters would improve the situation, for me, it's not dealing with the fundamental flaw of hiding the content, making less vulnerable to taking down, censorhip, centralization...

@eliotberriot another approach if you are against platform level paywalls would be to slightly paywall an entire content ecosystem, tie creation and consumption to a blockchain and automatically distribute monthly proceeds pro rata to creators.

This would allow free and open consumption within the confines of that space but build in attribution and financial incentives.

2: Free, decentralized, and donation based doesn’t actually make building audience for indie/unknown any easier. On the contrary it favors existing brands that have the power to drive eyeballs and support.

3: Creating quality content requires a lot of upfront resources, time, and planning which is very hard to do under a donation based system. Not predictable enough. Which is why most of the best content emanates from closed well financed distribution channels.

@rbenjamin Indeed, it needs a lot of ressources. But the amount of creators that can have proper deals to get stable income, it's quite low isn't it?

I tend to disagree with the second part of your toot: a lot of creators are producing quality content without stable income. In fact, I believe most of the popular creators start like that and obtain stable income *after* they gain popularity, which is a bit crazy when you think about it.

4: Using donation based system to fund the creator/team and not just the content could mitigate this but would need a strong quality and accountability mechanism to maintain the integrity of that kind of system.

@rbenjamin It may not be obvious in my thread, but in the model I'm discribing, there is no correlation between donations and content, people are effectively donating to a team/creator, based on goals defined by those teams.

But instead of being locked down on a specific platform, it's forwarded on the whole Fediverse (thus, we get decentralisation), along with channels to contribute (A patreon page, a Bitcoin address, whatever).

Like that, you get something that is decentralized (no single payment processor or platform).

5: It seems like it might be too much to solve all problems at once i.e. free access to everything for everyone (even those offline) VS building value for Independent creators so they can subsist and thrive from the effort they put into their creations.

6: a lot of people view centralization as inherently bad. But it is also inherently more efficiently. Especially when it comes to competing for attention on the open market.

Why not just have the creators and audience own some of that centralization. That way together they can complete against the Disney’s, Googles, and Marvels of the world but also have a transparent and equitable system for distribution.

I have a half-formed idea about how the network you describe could define itself and support itself (in part) through open licenses that expressly allow for commercial reuse of content, above and beyond being free (gratis).

Anyway, as I said earlier, I'm not a developer in any sense, so at the moment I'm more like just watching and waiting what other people come up with and every now and then throw my thinkpiece at it. :)

@eliotberriot@rbenjamin@Stoori This pretty much sounds like Liberapay, or public radio here in the US, in that the content is distributed for free and people pay whatever feels right. The new aspect appears to be that consumers are funding specific goals. So, basically, it's many-to-many crowdfunding. Right?

@Steve@Stoori@rbenjamin thus we need some kind of language for machines, and servers to make the contributions on behalf on the users.

It can be based on the content the consume (You listen to X and Y, your budget is split equally between those too), on things you want to support (I want to support 10 small artists in the Metal/Folk genre, your budget is split amongts creators matching this critaeria that need help reacing their goals)

@eliotberriot@rbenjamin@Stoori I like this idea, though I can't contribute anything at a technical level. I can see, however, that it would have to be very flexible. It would have to include all manner of media, genres, languages, currencies, and so on. It would almost amount to a trade network.

@Steve@Stoori@rbenjamin not necessarily if the network focuses on being a way for creators to express their needs and for users to forward their contributions to the proper place.

The network itself does not have to handle the transactions. Individual apps can integrate directly with various API/Payment providers for that, delagating this work to external services that will do it much better.

@Steve@rbenjamin@eliotberriot Federation could work very well for this purpose. Every publisher/outlet could have their own instance to propagate their own publications.

This could also neatly solve the question of curation (only edited content, or allow self-published content too): every instance could have their own curation rules (or none), and they could promote other instances with similar curation practices.

@eliotberriot@Stoori some argument to whether it’s sustainable but also maybe a different type of person enjoys contributing to a collective software project (tool building) to one who produces content in hopes of gaining audience and some day paying the bills with their endeavor.

A lot of FOSS folks also seem to have day jobs in the same vocation as their volunteer work content creators generally do not.

@rbenjamin for me, centralization is bad when it result in centralization of power, money and risks. Which is usually the case when a company is trusted to manage a huge library and can decide who's in and who's out.

In the schema I describe, creators could set up their own PeerTube/Funkwhale instance, or join existing collectives. Everything works, because there is no correlation between ocntent distribution and monetization.

Tired of people thinking branding yourself and begging for tips on band-aids like Flattr and Patreon and Liberapay is okay. It's not expected of other workers, why artists? Think about who this model favours and who it excludes.

I'd like your proposal in a context where people are sustained by an artists wage or universal income.